Month: August 2016

She first first contemplated a writing career as a poet at age six. That notion ended four years later when she found no ‘help wanted’ ads for poets in the Sunday NY Times classified section, but her desire to write persisted. After graduating from NY University, she headed west to pursue a career as a journalist before switching to fiction. Miko lives on Whidbey Island in Washington. You can find out more about her books and follow her for her latest releases at Amazon.

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Why do so many writers avoid or neglect promoting their work? Take me, for example. Deep down I believe I’m a capable writer, the author of books that are well written and enjoyable to read, literary enough to satisfy the mind, exciting enough to keep turning pages. But will I tell this to anyone? No.

I just did, you say? Not really. When you write something, you can detach from the words. Not so when you say them to someone face to face. With conviction, so they know you’re telling the truth and not exaggerating.

And it’s not just me. I’ve spoken about this to other writers, particularly women, and nearly all agree they have the same difficulty as me being direct when we talk about our work. We can state facts, like having a best seller on Amazon or having won an award. We can describe what the book is about. But if a prospective buyer asked us flat out if our book is good, I’m not sure any of us would answer, “Yes. Absolutely”.

I suspect one reason is what I call the Good Girl Syndrome. I was raised in an era when females were taught to be modest, not only in appearance, but in manner. A proper lady never bragged, no matter how exceptional or accomplished. I think it’s why I find it difficult to talk about the quality of my novels to prospective readers, despite my enthusiasm.

I’m not alone. I belong to a writers group that has banded together to sell our books at local Farmers’ markets. We help each other and sell whatever is on the stand. I only feel comfortable presenting my own books to customers when they ask if any of them are mine, or if we carry historical fiction. A handful of writers plug their own work, often blatantly, and they sell far more than I do. Most of us hang back and let the customers decide what they want to buy, or we talk up each other’s books. Maybe that sounds more sincere.

I’m thrilled when I hear people who’ve read my novels tell me how much they’ve enjoyed them, how they’re looking forward to the next sequel. More than one has urged me to “hurry up and write more”. I’m most flattered when someone far from my target audience compliments my work. Yet somehow I can’t turn that around and use it to encourage others to buy my work. This has led to a theory: In fiction, the good guys win. In life, the good girls lose. But it hasn’t led to a solution.

It’s sound advice. However, if I followed it, my protagonist would be an insurance customer service rep, which is not as exciting as a pet psychic.

A better saying might be “Write what you want to know.” There will be a learning curve, but that’s half the fun. Take my Pet Psychic mysteries.

I’m not a pet psychic, nor did I have any experience with them before I researched my book. I didn’t even knew they existed. What I did have was a neurotic rescue mutt.

One day, while walking with a neighbor, she raved about how her friend’s dog had been transformed after a visit with a pet psychic. Why didn’t I bring Buster to one and see if it helped?

My first response? What a waste of money.

Later, as the more intriguing aspects of taking Buster to a psychic began to settle in, I thought I could make up some of my expenses if I could interest a magazine in running an article. I sent out queries and scheduled two appointments for my dog.

The first psychic, nationally recognized, was a disappointment. In fact, I based Frankie Chandler’s fake pet psychic business on her and a pet psychic I saw at a fair.

The second psychic, who preferred the title animal communicator, came to my home. Buster lay at his feet and periodically woofed. He definitely seemed more connected to my dog. Ever since, Benjamin Scuglia has been my go-to guy for background on Frankie Chandler’s psychic activities.

While my pup wasn’t cured of his anxiety issues, I did come up with an article for Fido Friendly Magazine called Calling All Canine Clairvoyants. Another neighbor suggested my next mystery feature a pet psychic as the detective, and since I now knew a pet psychic to help with my research and I also knew several animal trainers and behaviorists from working with Buster… .

Would I have attempted a pet psychic mystery if I hadn’t had a neurotic dog who needed help? Never. And yet, the Frankie Chandler books are my most popular mysteries to date.

The third Pet Psychic mystery is almost ready to go. It takes place on a cruise to Alaska, and the idea came while I was on a–wait for it–cruise to Alaska. Talk about enjoying the research!

I’m also working on a mystery with a priest protagonist. He’s a former exorcist who has been reassigned to an all-girl high school. Talk about wrestling with demons! (I can say that with confidence because I once was a teenage girl!) While I’m not yet an expert on exorcists, I have listened to hours of talks given to priest groups and others, and it’s fascinating stuff.

What’s going on in your life that you could mine for book material? What would you like to know that would make fun reading? Jump right in. If nothing else, you’ll beat everyone else at trivia games.

Jacqueline Vick is the author of over twenty published short stories, novelettes and mystery novels. Her April 2010 article for Fido Friendly Magazine, “Calling Canine Clairvoyants”, led to the first Frankie Chandler Pet Psychic mystery, Barking Mad About Murder. To find out more, visit her website .

Her latest book, Civility Rules, is available on Kindle, Nook, and in other ebook formats. Paperback is coming soon!

Madeline (M.M.) Gornell is the author of six award-winning mystery novels. Her current literary focus is Route 66 as it traverses California’s Mojave Desert. Madeline is a lifetime lover of mysteries, and besides reading and writing, is also a potter. She lives with her husband and assorted canines in the High Desert. For more information, visit her at website or Amazon Author Page.

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In my last post, I talked about “Openings.” Recently, the knowledge our reading personalities (our likes and dislikes) differ, was not only reinforced to me—but also the thought of writing about “Endings” came to mind as a good idea.

On the “our reading personalities differ” front, after reading the latest selection from my Book Club, I mentioned the book in a couple places and to a couple people because I liked some parts of the book a lot. Then I asked for and received input from both fellow authors and my Book Club. All their thoughts caused me to think again about how important Endings are. I already knew how special they were to me (both as an author and as a reader). But there’s knowing, and then there’s knowing.

I liked this particular book especially for its opening and ending (fond of unresolved characters, symbolism, and lyricism). I found the middle sagged, and the issues weren’t ones that particularly grabbed me. So, here’s my “readers are different” reinforcement anecdotes. Among other items, feedback I received was:

Didn’t like the end because it was too open ended—i.e. what happened to…

Almost put it down because didn’t like beginning…

Didn’t like beginning or end, but loved the story, mainly the dialogue and the issues…

Smile!

I’m what I call a “Pantster” when it comes to writing. That means specifically, I usually write the beginning first, then the end[i], and finally fill in the middle. And that filling in the middle jumps around a lot—but that’s the fun part. That’s where the plot twists and turns come in. My personal joy in writing.

So, at the risk of possibly once again offering more than you want to know about how writing actually happens for one particular author, here’s even more. The kind of endings I love to read:

Tie to the beginning, giving the reader that “Oh yeah, I remember how all this started” feeling,

Endings that leave readers with pictures in their minds—not just mental, but photographic too,[ii](in color with all the senses involved is even better!)

And highly desired, is leaving a symbolic nugget of some kind.

I live in a rural desert area, and if I want to get anywhere near civilization, I have to drive over one of two Burlington Northern/Santa Fe railroad tracks. One train line I usually get caught sitting at runs along Route 66. Several days ago, the train was relatively short compared to some, and it stuck out visually that there was an engine on both ends. And in my mind, symbolic at that moment in time, the lead engine was pulling the reader along the story track, but when at the end of the line, the ending engine would take your mind farther past a particular book, or back into the book. I know, fanciful and a flawed example in several ways—but sitting there, waiting for that train to pass gave me several ideas on how to improve my current ending.

And yes, every time I open my WIP, I “touch up” not only the beginning, but also the end.

I’m hoping there might be a writing tidbit here about the importance of the impression your reader is left with at the end–given all our differing likes and dislikes. Having readers of your offering who not only say, “wow,” I liked that, or even “ptooie,” what an awful book; but more–such as a not easily forgotten image(s) left in their minds. And just maybe ideas and thoughts taking them farther than the tale just finished. For me it’s a lofty goal, but one that keeps me striving, keeps me writing.

I also want the ending sentences to be lyrical—and what exactly I mean by that is another blog for another day. (translation—I haven’t figured out yet what exactly I mean by that. One of those “I know ‘it’ when I experience it in other books” kind of thing.)

Happy (writing) trails!

[i] Sometimes it’s the end first, then the beginning. [ii] Fire Horses by Robert Haig is a prime example for me.

“OUTSIDE THE LINES”

Book Review by Jackie Houchin

Sheila Lowe’s newest Claudia Rose Forensic Handwriting mystery delivers just what you are looking for; murder and mayhem, crime scene investigation, clues and mis-clues, secret assignations, lovers’ spats, blurred lines between right and wrong, escalating suspense, and unique to Lowe’s books, a protagonist who can read a killer’s thoughts and intents from a mere sampling of his handwriting.

OUTSIDE THE LINES begins with a bang, literally. A maid attempts to gather her vacationing employer’s mail one morning and dies after a mailbox bomb explodes in her face. LAPD Homicide Detective Joel Jovanic catches the case and quickly discerns the incident to be more than a prank.

Across town in the Los Angeles Criminal Courts building, Claudia Rose testifies as an expert witness in a murder trial involving gang member, Danny Ortiz. Having given her condemning statement, she exits the stand, only to be ferociously attacked and nearly murdered by the unrestrained gangbanger. Worse yet, clips of the incident replay endlessly on the local news channels, exposing not only Ortiz’s rage, but a good deal of Claudia’s brief undergarments.

Traumatized and nursing her wounds, Claudia hides at home, jumping at every noise, seeing shadows where none exist; the classic symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Det. Jovanic is both enraged by the attack on his fiancé and anxious about her emotional state. To relieve the tension at home, he submerges himself in the mailbox bombing investigation.

Relief from her growing paranoia comes in the form of an invitation to speak at the prestigious British Institute of Graphologists Conference in the UK. Claudia gratefully accepts, but before leaving, she helps Jovanic identify the author of the bomb threat from a writing specimen found inside a nearby geo-cache container. Under the “People for Safe Food” moniker, she detects an erased signature, that of a known eco-terrorist.

In London, a surprise interview by a TV journalist puts Claudia in the limelight, and on the spot. Asked her opinion on a handwritten note found in a similar geo-cache container in London after a local bombing, Claudia is reluctant to speak. The two samples were not written by the same person, but this contradicts the resident expert’s opinion, a man Claudia knows to be untrained and biased.

Across the Pond, Jovanic’s investigation leads him to the CEO of Agrichem, a company that produces toxic pesticides. Lab reports from the mailbox bomb confirm the lethal chemical is used in Agrichem’s pesticides. The detective senses something is off, especially after interviewing the company’s reclusive “mad” research scientist.

Meanwhile Claudia meets with members of the People for Safe Food activist group and responds to their grief with compassion, earning her the ire of New Scotland Yard. Jovanic’s interviews produce testimony just as compelling about the need for pesticides in feeding a hungry world. Two sides of the world and two sides of a controversial issue. Which side is responsible for murder?

More cruel attacks and homicides keep Jovanic working at a manic pace, while Claudia is politely asked to leave the UK. At home, she and Jovanic face another more personal issue, which could determine the future of their life together. Finally a truce is called and the pair work together using their specialties to identify a very cold and ruthless murderer. The detective determines to take him down, and now Claudia is the one fearing for her lover’s life.

Part fast-paced police procedural and part Sherlockian puzzle mystery, Lowe’s OUTSIDE THE LINES, delivers food for the intellectual as well as the suspense addict. And for readers like me who are fascinated with the Forensic Handwriting Analysis profession, it’s a treat indeed. The police have sketch artists, Crime Scene Investigators, and DNA testing. Handwriting examiners testify in court, bringing evidence that often brings a guilty verdict. But Sheila Lowe has an unstoppable crime investigating team in Claudia Rose and Detective Joel Jovanic.

OUTSIDE THE LINES is sixth in the popular mystery series. Sheila Lowe has also written a stand-alone thriller in which her Handwriting Specialist appears in a minor role (What She Saw). Like her fictional character Claudia Rose, Lowe is a real-life forensic handwriting expert who testifies in court cases. She has begun work on the 7th book in the series, UNHOLY WRIT.

As the current president of the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation (a 50 yr old non-profit), Lowe is working with their Campaign for Cursive committee to bring attention to the importance of maintaining cursive training in the public school curriculum. A recently published white paper on the topic is available for free download: http://www.ahafhandwriting.org/sites/default/pdf/white-paper.pdf

For a live podcast (and transcript) interview of Sheila Lowe by Laura Brennan of Destination Mystery visit: http://destinationmystery.com/episode-17-sheila-lowe/ In it Lowe reveals more about the two major areas of handwriting analysis, as well as a formerly unrecognized “theme” to her writing that Brennan identifies. As to her writing fiction, Lowe discloses the title of the book that got her started on her mystery writing career… at the young age of 8.

Can you guess what it was? Nope, not Nancy Drew.

Jackie Houchin is a Christian writer, book reviewer, and retired photojournalist. She writes articles and reviews on a variety of topics, and occasionally edits manuscripts. She also dabbles in short fiction. She enjoys creating Bible craft projects for kids; growing fruits, flowers, and veggies; and traveling to other countries. She also loves cats and kittens and mysteries.”

A former private detective and reporter for a small weekly newspaper, G.B.Pool writes the Johnny Casino Casebook Series and the Gin Caulfield P.I. Mysteries. She teaches writing classes: “Anatomy of a Short Story,” “How To Write Convincing Dialogue” and “Writing a Killer Opening Line.”

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Shakespeare died 400 years ago, but we all have read his plays. There is talk now that schools want to stop teaching works by the guys who basically gave us the foundation of our modern literature. I would give you their astute reasoning, but there is no good reason behind it. It’s a stupid idea.

Aristotle, Euripides, Aristophanes, Sophocles… I hope those names aren’t Greek to you (Sorry, that’s a little literary humor.), but these men crafted the basics of writing as we know it. Centuries later we got Shakespeare and Chaucer and Christopher Marlowe, Ibsen, Chekhov and, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and the Bronte Sisters. And list goes on and on.

They make movies based on these books. People still read the classics. Some of the wording is a tad dated, but the stories are still relevant. Romeo and Juliet turned into West Side Story. How many retellings of A Christmas Carol have there been? Good lasts.This takes me to Anna Katharine Green and Mary Roberts Rinehart. These two ladies lived a hundred years ago. Anna Katharine Green wrote her Amelia Butterworth character in 1897, well before Agatha Christie wrote The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) featuring Miss Marple. Christie acknowledges Green as her inspiration. Green also wrote about a young female amateur sleuth, Violet Strange, years before the first Nancy Drew stories hit the bookstore shelves.

Mary Roberts Rinehart turned out her first mystery, The Man in Lower Ten, in 1906 and The Circular Staircase in 1907, both astonishingly good mystery stories. She references both Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in that first mystery. She went on to pen her Letitia Carberry stories featuring three old spinsters who have adventures and calamities that are rollickingly funny and dead clever.

She is considered the source for the term: “The butler did it.” She didn’t use that exact phrase, but the butler was the culprit. She even has a series of stories centered around World War I. She was a trained nurse and married a doctor; so much of what she writes has facts behind it. She even served as a war correspondent during World War I in Belgium and toured the front lines, so the visuals are based on things she saw firsthand. Not all her stories are mysteries, but they are all good, solid stories, some even slightly romantic, but nothing even remotely lurid. How refreshing.

I started with the Anna Katherine Green stories. When I first started reading these two ladies, I couldn’t believe they were written a hundred years ago. The writing is fresh, some of the social/political comments could have been written today, and the work is witty, clever, and occasionally deliciously sarcastic. I have to admit, both ladies used a few words that are no longer in the vernacular (look it up), but since I was reading on my Kindle, I could look up the meanings right there and then carry on. But the overall feeling was that I was reading something written yesterday, not a century ago. I was and am still amazed at the contemporary handling of the stories.

The list of literary greats from that time and earlier does contain preponderance of male writers, but that’s just the way it was for quite a few centuries. Health care got better so women weren’t dying during childbirth, household appliances were invented to make domestic life easier, and some women decided they wanted to write… and they did. Women wrote short stories for magazines and even penned a few books. They showed what was possible.

But these two ladies weren’t writing fluff or recipes. In fact, there was a lawsuit against Anna Katharine Green because some fool didn’t believe a woman could write a story with such an accurate legal basis as a plot. Well, the idiot ate his words. Green’s father was a lawyer and the lady knew what she was writing about.

If you can’t find hardback books by these ladies, there are e-book collections of their many stories available at remarkably low prices. Some single stories are free, the work transcribing their books to an e-Book format done by volunteers. God Bless them. Some books are only available for free. (I pay for nearly every book that I read. These tireless workers who provided the works of these great ladies and frankly all writers deserve that we pay for their efforts.) These collections contain both novel-length stories and short stories and novellas.

And something else for you writers, these ladies show how to tell a story with a ton of stuff in them, no repetition, lots of plot, character and setting that will make you reevaluate your own writing. Remember, they did these stories a hundred years ago. They were cutting edge in the mystery genre… some of the first to do this genre, male or female. And their works are good.

As many contemporary books as I have read by men and women, these books are rising to the top as my favorites because they did it first and did it beautifully. Cleanly crafted, lots of stuff happening, lots of great characters. Some of the stories you don’t want to end. That is literary gold.